I sent a message to the mods of the /r/sequence sub, and got a response.

my message was
Subject: Open
Message: sesame

the reply i got was
i n i t i a t e...?

let's only upvote text that says "Type here to add text" and only upvote gifs that are basically nothing.

im doing this by youtube link now

https://youtu.be/bcBOXsb8qto

Is it now?

If you look at https://www.reddit.com/sequence, you'll find text saying nonsensical sentences about gifs. There is also pictures on the top of the teaser that look like an animation reel. I believe this could be a hint that Sequence could be an animation creator or something. However, it looks like something more. The Reddit Twitter account has been posting things like 'help us.'. It's weird.

I'm getting extremely excited for this though. April 1 is like christmas for Redditors, and with the lackluster Circle Of Trust last year, I think this year will be a step up. Honestly I believe there should be a Place 2, but I think this April Fools will be fun.

Also, Reddit's taking their damn time to release the thing.

Received a message from one of the admins, in response to my my last-ditch mod-message to r/sequence :

i n i t i a t e...?

Is it starting? Hmmm ...

There may be hope as there are a few hours left, but unless something massively new comes, it's clear to see this has been a failure. It's clear to see where the reddit bois were trying to go, but it just hasn't happened. This is not a story. Just nonsencal gifs lazly put together next to eachother. Unless something changes the game completely, it's clear to see this hasn't worked out.

I am so not proud of this community....

A response from one of the admins of 'The Sequence Narrators' discord

This writeup might be a bit long, so bear with me. But i will take you from A to Z of this journey.

How did this year's april fools even work?

It worked like this: The event concised of 7 Acts. Prologue, Act 1-5 and Epilogue. In each Act there were 20-50 scenes, or GIFs, that people could vote on. Users would upload and place their vote on a GIF or text they liked. Voting was never locked, and if you saw something funnier or better, you could simply change your vote. The GIFs also had their own direct link that you could post or send to others so they could vote for your GIF.

After some time, 8 hours for Act1-5, the sequence of 50 GIFs would start to lock and be the final GIF for that scene. After all the scenes had been locked, the next Act would open and everyone could upload new GIFs to new scenes.

GIFs uploaded directly to r/sequence did not end up in the actual Acts. Hard to say, but many users might have thought so.

Early 2019

This is when it mostly started. A small community got together to start a new discord server in preparations for the 2019 april fools event.

March 2019

The pre-april fools ARG was released and the previously mentioned community renamed the discord server to 'sequencemeta' and created the r/sequencemeta subreddit. While the ARG was happening we came into contact with 'The Snakeroom'. 'The Snakeroom' had already 10 times the amount of users compared, and was around 1500 users at the time, if i recall correctly.

r/sequence became public

The april fools event had started. There were no such thing as 'The Sequence Narrators' at this point. Prologue came and people started participating. Prologue was a very chaotic time, and many didn't understand how the event worked. By the time Prologue was over, the discord server known as 'The Sequence Narrators' had been started.

The communities that banded together

To say that 'The Sequence Narrators' was behind it all would be a blatant lie. We formed connections and got into contact with other communities, and constantly tried to spread the word, and when we started to grow, the community comprised of several larger ones. The communities were:

• 'The Snakeroom' with about 5K users

• 'Something for Everybody' with about 50K users

• 'April Knights' with about 500 users

• 'The Sequence Narrators' with about 500 users

Other communities also contibuted, such as MLP, but we lost overview around Act 4.

Our intentions

The goal of the server was to unite communities and create short stories or a narrative that was not as chaotic as Prologue. We aimed for a united agreement of all the communities. One of the rules that was the most enforced was to 'not push your own agenda, but post ideas'. We made sure that everyone was heard and could voice their opinion. If there was any conflicts, we had public polls and open discussions.

Narratives started to form

The first coherent story was actually not made by the narrators. In Act 1 the people in the 'April Knights' community came together on their own and /u/Fisher_P created the small Monty Python story as seen from scene 31-36, without any help.

The first successfull story from the narrators were the Spongebob story in Act 2, scene 23-32.

Act 3

During Act 2 we shifted our focus and tried to create a story we could present in Act 3, since so many liked the more cohesive storytelling. Act 3 is our success story. Pretty much everyone seemed to love it.

Act 4

Act 4 came too quick for us, so The popular vote was to play it as 1 story, and it never changed from that.

Act 5

Act 5's timing was a nightmare. People had been busy brainstorming and creating GIF's for Act 4, that Act 5 cought us by surprise Others say it did not come as very sudden, but my impression was so. As well as most of the world was asleep when it was unlocked, people scrambled to complete something. It was a rushed narrative, but we felt we had to do something so it wouldn't be a chaotic mess again. We had amazing mods and ambassadors that worked hard to make it happen.

Epilogue

We wanted to not create a narrative for the epilogue. Scenes 2-13 were unplanned. The next 4 scenes were set aside to credits. Most of the users in our communities wanted some sort of credit for the hard work they put through. It eventually landed on what you see today. That is however when the real hatred and backlash came.

The usernet tool

Most of the backlash we got was from using the tool. People are calling it bots. It is not bots.

The tool, sneknet.com, was developed by 'The Snakeroom' during Act 1. The tool was a browser extension that would use your reddit account to vote for the GIFs what the communities agreed would be the narrative. Therefore we could use the tool to suggest our narrative to reddit's massive userbase.

On the peak of users in our communities, we only had 130 people using the extension. Almost all of the users in our communites used their own individual vote, instead of the tool.

What the data show

Here is a link to a graph: https://imgur.com/a/Cy9Mc4U

The orange shows the votes for the top GIF in each scene and Act. Here we can seee that it was usually around 25% of all the votes that agreed on the top GIF. But most people lost interest very quickly. But we can dive into individual scenes and see how reddit as a whole voted.

Act 2, scene 9: When the GIFs came up, we supported the story, even though we didn't make it(AFAIK). But later the fan GIF came, and reddit outvoted us.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/sequence/scene?chapter=2&scene=9

Act 2, scene 22: The narrators had agreed on a Spongebob intro. But the reddit users disagreed and outvoted us.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/sequence/scene?chapter=2&scene=22

Act 3, scene 37: Initially planned as the 'Heart' GIF, reddit disagreed and outvoted us, and got the egg instead.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/sequence/scene?chapter=3&scene=37

Those are some of the scenes where reddit decided against us, and we were fine with it. In fact, we changed our minds and our votes and supported the new suggestion. Frankly, for the better. The fan and egg GIFs are comedy gold.

So what does the data show? Reddit could not unite and create something coherent. Subreddits did not come together like they did during r/place. It show that most people wanted their own GIF to succeed, and did not see the whole picture. Act 3, scene 1 in the graph is a good example of that.

Reddit as a whole did not participate in this event. This subreddit have 180K subscribers, yet only 10% of that number participated.

Compared to r/place

We can all agree that Place was peak reddit. So how can we compare this event to Place? During Place subreddits and communities got together to make something their own. Reddit had the opportunity again this year, but most did not seem to be as interested. The community that did show an interest in it effectively beat everyone else.

Did the reddit admins approve of this?

Before the sneknet was developed the developers checked with the reddit admins if they were cool with it, and not breaking any TOS. Several of the reddit admins were present in 'The Snakeroom' discord server during the development. Here are some responses from the reddit admins: https://imgur.com/a/JpkoLfj

https://www.reddit.com/r/sequence/comments/b95466/sequence_is_over/ek2b1kb/

https://imgur.com/a/ihUvf0k

https://imgur.com/a/kQ9AIzY

Conclusion

The narrators, snakeroom, april knights and SfE united towards a common goal. We were happy that different commuities could come together and cooperate to create something special. We thought the event was pretty cool, and a fun experiment as it made communities work together.

Thank you reddit!

Edit: Small changes.

WE STILL CANT JOIN

Check this out on Poe: https://poe.com/Assistant

I really want to touch it....

I don't know why....

There's just something about it...

It compels me...

Egg...

Egg..

Egg.

the void must be reborn

End it on a full circle lol.